1. Not Marketing in the First Place

While this may seem like an overly obvious point to make, you would be astounded at the number of online entrepreneurs who fail to market their content in any way.

There are millions, if not billions, of other voices clouding the Internet, sharing their opinions through blogs, YouTube, and social media, and simply putting your content out there for the world is not enough; you must master content marketing if you want to stand a chance against your competition.

2. Marketing Content That Is Low Quality

You know the old saying, “If it is worth doing, it is worth doing right”? Well, that is doubly true in content marketing. Nothing will cause your audience to become more actively disengaged or indifferent towards you and your brand than properly marketing improper content.

Before you ever consider using email, social media, podcasts or the whole host of other content marketing avenues, make sure that your content is useful to your audience and worth marketing in the first place.

3. Ignoring the Power of Headlines

If the average person views more than 300 advertisements a day, then how in the world can you expect to stand out without investing serious time and effort into your headlines.One of the biggest mistakes I see many newbie entrepreneurs make is that they write great content with crappy headlines. It doesn’t matter how amazing your article or YouTube video is if you don’t have an engaging or even provocative headline, your marketing efforts are doomed to fail.

4. Ignoring Analytics and Data

Whether you are a numbers person or not, understanding things like the conversion rate, click through rate, bounce rate, and user engagement is critical to content marketing success. Content marketing is all about experimentation, but to play the role of the “mad scientist” with your experiments requires that you are willing to take a look at the numbers and make changes based off of data, not off of personal predisposition.

Just because you like a headline or marketing method does not necessarily make it good. Reviewing the data and seeing that your headline or marketing method outperforms your other tests does.

5. Failing to Optimize for SEO

I know many successful entrepreneurs who think that SEO is dead. They focus their marketing efforts on other channels and as a result, leave tons of traffic just sitting on the table when it could be funneled to their websites. While SEO is not the most important part of content marketing, it is an important part. Treat it as such and make sure that your content is properly optimized for search engines so that potential clients can easily find you and your product.

6. Forgetting the Hustle

OK, so you tweeted out about your new article once… Now what? Content marketing can only be successful if you are willing to hustle your content, this means that you have to aggressively market it through several different avenues.

This means emailing your content out, repurposing content on various platforms. For example, turning an article into an infographic, YouTube video or podcast, marketing it across several different social media channels and getting influencer endorsements. Every time you create a new piece of content, you need to be sure that you are hustling it out to as many different channels as possible.

7. Forgetting to Check Your Work

Remember in English class when teachers would nag you about checking your work for careless grammar mistakes and typos? Well, they had a point. Your goal is to be seen as an expert and a leader in your field. How in the world will people trust you if your content is riddled with typos? This is something that I struggled with for a while. In my rush to publish new content, I would often overlook careless little mistakes.

i mEan rally? Wood u trust smone who content lookz like tis?

Get my point? Now, more than ever before this has a simple fix. Just plug your content into Grammarly for a quick (and free) spell and grammar check before you hit publish. If you are doing more academic writing, then upgrading to the premium version may serve you better.

Conclusion

Content marketing is simple, but it is not easy. The first step is to get started and hit the ground running. So play around with your marketing options, experiment with different avenues and see what works best for you. You don’t have to see the whole staircase to start but you have to start to see the whole staircase. If you are willing to put in the work of creating and marketing high-quality content, the market will reward you. Guaranteed.

Which of these or other content marketing mistakes have you made? What have you learnt from it? Hit me up on Twitter to let me know.

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